It will be necessary, for several reasons, to give this short sketch
the form rather of a critical essay than of a biography. The data for
a life of Nathaniel Hawthorne are the reverse of copious, and even if
they were abundant they would serve but in a limited measure the
purpose of the biographer. Hawthorne's career was probably as tranquil
and uneventful a one as ever fell to the lot of a man of letters; it
was almost strikingly deficient in incident, in what may be called the
dramatic quality. Few men of equal genius and of equal eminence can
have led on the whole a simpler life. His six volumes of Note Books
illustrate this simplicity; they are a sort of monument to an
unagitated fortune. Hawthorne's career had few vicissitudes or
variations; it was passed for the most part in a small and homogeneous
society, in a provincial, rural community; it had few perceptible
points of contact with what is called the world, with public events,
with the manners of his time, even with the life of his neighbours.
Its literary incidents are not numerous. He produced, in quantity, but
little. His works consist of four novels and the fragment of another,
five volumes of short tales, a collection of sketches, and a couple of
story books for children. And yet some account of the man and the
writer is well worth giving. Whatever may have been Hawthorne's
private lot, he has the importance of being the most beautiful and
most eminent representative of a literature. The importance of the
literature may be questioned, but at any rate, in the field of
letters, Hawthorne is the most valuable example of the American
genius. That genius has not, as a whole, been literary; but Hawthorne
was on his limited scale a master of expression. He is the writer to
whom his countrymen most confidently point when they wish to make a
claim to have enriched the mother tongue, and, judging from present
appearances, he will long occupy this honourable position. If there is
something very fortunate for him in the way that he borrows an added
relief from the absence of competitors in his own line and from the
general flatness of the literary field that surrounds him, there is
also, to a spectator, something almost touching in his situation. He
was so modest and delicate a genius that we may fancy him appealing
from the lonely honour of a representative attitude perceiving a
painful incongruity between his imponderable literary baggage and the
large conditions of American life. Hawthorne on the one side is so
subtle and slender and unpretending, and the American world on the
other is so vast and various and substantial, that it might seem to
the author of The Scarlet Letter and the Mosses from an Old Manse ,
that we render him a poor service in contrasting his proportions with
those of a great civilization. But our author must accept the awkward
as well as the graceful side of his fame; for he has the advantage of
pointing a valuable moral. This moral is that the flower of art blooms
only where the soil is deep, that it takes a great deal of history to
produce a little literature, that it needs a complex social machinery
to set a writer in motion. American civilization has hitherto had
other things to do than to produce flowers, and before giving birth to
writers it has wisely occupied itself with providing something for
them to write about... Continue reading book >>